Ex-Amazon VP: Do This at Work to Get Promoted Fast | Ethan Evans

Burnout is less, it turns out, about hard work. It's more about losing your vision. You no longer know where you're going. I'm just going to keep my head down and work hard. I call this work hard and hope to be noticed. Hope is not a very good strategy.

Why is it that people with half your talent seem to be winning all of the time? Ethan Evans should know. He's a retired Amazon VP. He's going to give us the exact framework he used to climb from getting fired twice early in his career to running multiple billion-dollar businesses. What do you see Jeff Bezos do?

Differently. He often said we need to be strategically patient but tactically impatient. So it's feeling this urgency of how do I move my business forward as far as I possibly can today? And yet realizing that building something of real value might take 10 years.

There's someone listening right now. They get to take one piece of advice from this podcast. What is the one thing you would give them?

Know what you want, know where you're going, and Everyone talks about climbing the corporate ladder.

Yeah. But it's much more than a corporate ladder. I think it's like climbing a corporate ladder while somebody's trying to pull it from underneath you and somebody else has cut it from up above and there's all these politics. And so you've navigated the politics at the highest level of the game. What do you wish you knew about corporate politics when you started that you know now?

Boy, I think the thing I wish I had known most about what's been called corporate politics is it's just other people trying to get ahead. Like, they're, they're just starting with what do they need and what do they want. And sometimes if you're in their way, it's not personal. They don't even notice. It's just your accidental roadkill. Sometimes it's intentional. So one thing I wish I had known is just figure out what other people's motives are. And that doesn't mean they have like a hidden or deep or dark motive, just Sometimes their motives don't align with yours. The other thing you said is you called it a corporate ladder, and that's what it's always been called. I've heard a new analogy I like better, which is the corporate climbing wall, because it's wider. You can go up, you can go down, you can go sideways. There's many routes to the top. And I think that's the new way of looking at it. It's not just one path. I guess the key question is, why is what they are doing working for them? That's the insight is stop being frustrated and start asking, well, why, why is the corporation rewarding that?

Yeah. How can you tell if someone is going to be your advocate or is actually going to be your adversary in the workplace?

Yeah, well, one way, of course, is relationship. If, if you can be friends on any sort of topic, commonality, common place you went to school, common sports team you like, kids, whatever, it's more likely they're going to advocate because We take care of our friends. The second thing though is people help those who help them. And I think I made a lot of my career effectively by deal-making, by finding people that I could align with what they wanted and help them get what they want. And then I would sometimes talk to them privately and be like, hey, I will help you get this, but like, I'm looking for a little help here. And most people, are very willing to, hey, you help me, I'll help you, because there's no harm in it. And so if you can't do that though, and someone wants something completely opposite of what you want, then there can be a problem. The other thing could shoot down is style. If there was a case, you know, where like I'm very outspoken and driven and you run into somebody who's very consensus-based and wants to be cautious, that can lead to friction right away because I think a lot like you, I'm like, let's go, let's make a decision. And they're like, let's study it. Now, of course, I'm like giving a little lilty voice, which probably isn't fair, but that's how it felt to me. And of course they're like, this guy's crazy. So that can lead to conflict where I'm pushing them past their risk threshold and they see me as reckless. Meanwhile, I see them as like, oh my God, would you just go?

Yeah. Can you think about a story about how bad it can get?

The worst story I know of that I've seen is when someone has a setback, when one of the leaders has a failure. I've seen people who are in a competitive situation use that as like, ooh, kick them while they're down. Like, because they're on the rocks, they may have been a good performer, they may be a good performer again. You've got this one moment, if you don't like them, to like dogpile on top of them and finish them off. And a couple times I've definitely seen people who seem very unassuming and like they had nothing to say, like all these fangs come out right when they see the, you know, they see a little blood in the water, maybe use a shark analogy, and they start the feeding frenzy. So I've seen that on people who struggle, is finish them off while they're down. And that to me seemed like give them a hand up.

Yeah, well, it's good to know. I mean, it's one thing what we think should happen, and then there's reality. And so if you always live in what should happen, what what's Pollyanna, what's rose-colored glasses, you're not gonna get far in life. Forget corporations versus startups versus being independent. And so I think this is so important to talk about because people think that everybody acts like them. People think that everybody acts quote unquote good or everybody's going to do the quote unquote right thing. And that's just not human nature.

So can I interject here? I rant at people almost every time you use the word should, you're giving up agency or in your terms that you like ownership. Every time I think, okay, Codie, you're my manager. You should be looking out for my career. What I've just done is stop looking out for myself and put it on you. And now I'm reliant on you to do something which I don't control. So I actually teach people anytime they start thinking about what someone else should do, they should step back and say, okay, how am I going to make sure that happens? Or what can I do if they don't? Because as soon as I get into what should happen, which is what you mentioned, I'm waiting for someone else to do this right thing that I don't control.

What do you think is the difference between a good boss and a bad boss?

I think a good boss is consistent and transparent. They're clear about how they're judging or what they expect, and then they stick to it even when things get tough. So you will hear some bosses who say things like, I want you to push, I want you to take risks, but then something goes wrong and they're like, oh, I didn't mean that risk, and they throw you under the bus. That's That's terrible. That's a bad boss. The good bosses are like, hey, okay, I told you to do this. It didn't work out, but we'll clean it up together. So I think consistency and transparency, good. Inconsistency is brutal because you just don't— it makes you hesitant, right? It makes you unwilling to take a risk because you're not sure what ground you're on. I'd rather have hard standards I disagree with than fuzzy standards that I don't know. If I have to pick, I'd rather be working for a boss I don't agree with, but who's really clear, than one who sounds agreeable but then shifts with the wind.

Let's say somebody is just starting at a company and they're trying to kind of get the lay of the land for the players. How do you know if you work for a good boss or a bad boss?

First, good boss or bad boss, are people leaving or are people coming? Because reputation travels. And if the first signal of a boss is, are they gaining talent or losing talent? If people want out, probably a bad boss. If people want in, probably a good boss. Beyond that though, my favorite trick, of course you can talk to your boss. You can try it. You should be trying to build that relationship and ask them what they want. But if they're not very forthcoming, talk to your peers, ask them. What's a pet peeve? Or I see a flattery is great. I can say, Codie Sanchez, I see you get such great results from our manager. How do you do that? Would you share your secret? And it's flattering. And most people like to talk about themselves. So odds are, even if you wouldn't be like, I'm going to tell you exactly how to be as successful as I am, and now you'll be my competitor, you'll be lured in by like, oh, someone wants to hear my secret. They think highly of me, blah, blah, blah. It's a social engineer.

That's really, really smart, actually. Yeah, it's, you know, I remember, like, a lot of this reminds me, you have a philosophy called the magic loop. Yes. And I would be curious if you would explain that to us.

Sure. So the magic loop got its name from the idea it works so well it can be magical. And it began, I sort of discovered this in my very first job. I got a new boss and she was nice but didn't understand our technology. I was a young engineer and I said, look, I could teach you about it. And I didn't have any plan. I just, oh, well, if you don't know, I'll teach you. Well, that started a relationship where she saw me as helpful and being on her side, and she took me under her wing and over the next 2 years promoted me twice and kind of kickstarted my career. And of course I started thinking like, this is pretty good. I wonder if there's something more here. And, and that's where the essence of The Magic Loop came from. The idea behind it is simply build a collaborative relationship with your manager. Find out what they need. This is, of course, in corporate America where you have a manager. Find out what they need and try and help them with it. And then presuming you're successful, the second thing you can do is have a conversation with them and say, look, it's really great I'm helping you. I kind of like to do this. I'd like to become a leader, learn this technology, or get a raise or get on this project. Can you help me with that? And good managers will invest back in you. Even I would say most managers will take care of those who are helping them. You can't have the problem that a truly bad manager, you know, kind of has this evil cackling like, this is great, you're doing what I want. No, I'm going to keep you prisoner. You can figure that out though pretty quick and move on. So the idea of the magic loop is get in this virtuous cycle of, hey, I help you, you help me. And so, for example, I have an employee who started with me at Amazon as an entry-level engineer, really. He had 4 years of total experience in his career. He stayed with me 8 years, was promoted 3 times, and then went out on his own. He founded his own company, something, you know, I'm sure near and dear to your heart. After that, he took a job back in the corporate world,. And now he has a far bigger organization than I ever had. He runs a 3,000-person global organization for a household name bank you would certainly know. And that's all him working with me to grow his career. You know, I could see this guy was a rock star and I just made a deal with him and said, look, you support me, I'll support you, we'll do this together. And then at some point I set him free and he flew like a bird.

Interesting. And so is this, does that go back to like the law of reciprocity basically? So if you give somebody something, they're gonna give you something in return almost from human nature?

Yes, absolutely. The, the key insight is when you give a gift, even if you give it with an open heart, mo— without expecting anything, most people feel a little bit indebted and wanna pay you back. So that's the beginning. But the second thing is in a corporate world, there's a real practicality to that. I've surveyed thousands of managers by having them raise their hands and ask them, how often does someone on your team offer you help? I'll even put you a little bit on your spot here. We'll motivate your team when they watch this. How often do people come knock on your door here at Contrarian Thinking and say, Codie Sanchez, I just have a little extra time and I wonder what else could I do to help you?

Yeah, like negative 5, right? That's, that's not fair, actually. There are. But you know what? The people who do that, they get promoted and they make more money.

Here's the key. Do those people make an immediate impression on you the first time they ask?

Oh yeah, it's so rare.

Right. Because it's— and this insight, you are no different than thousands of other managers I've talked to. They all say the same things. Number 1, it's so rare to be asked. Number 2, it makes an immediate impression on me. And number 3, oh God, I wish it happened more. And so by being that person who goes and asks, you can almost always trigger this reciprocity because you're a leader. "Tell me, do you have lots of worries about your business?" Of course. Okay, so if someone, this is a little off-color, but I basically say, look, there are two types of employees. There are those who bring their manager bags of poop and lay it on the desk and say, "Hey, I found this problem. Here, Codie." And then there are the rare people who come in and say, "Codie, what do you need? Oh, I see you have a bag there. It looks pretty smelly. Let me take care of that for you." And those are the people you want. And so overly graphic, but be a poop taker, not a poop bringer.

I think that the part that is lost a little bit today in the world is that it's so much easier to just talk about how bad bosses are and to say that they're narcissists and they suck and it's corporate and the man's against you and they make more money and you make less and they use all your work. And all of that might be true, but it's not going to help you make more money. And so for most people, less than 10% of people own a business. So 90% of people will never own a business. If that's true, you got a fucking boss. And so if you have a boss, you might as well figure out how to manipulate the system. And I could never figure out, and I don't mean it negatively manipulate, just manipulate meaning to move something in a direction that you'd like. And I think it's so interesting because if we were to do a Shorts clip and clip the part where we say, how to make your— make more money from your boss, it'll do so much worse than is your boss a bad boss or a good boss? Just, just human nature.

And so people like a train wreck story for sure. And they like to hear— and of course I've had, I've had and I've seen terrible bosses and terrible behavior and that's common. But you're right, this goes back to what I said about should an agency or you know, ownership, which we both care about— ownership in the sense of owning your own destiny— if you're sitting around complaining about how unfair the corporate system is, you're stuck. And what are you doing? Like, yes, all these unfair things are true, but plenty of people still succeed. So what are you going to do about it? If your boss is so bad, change bosses. If you believe all bosses are bad, then do what you did, you found your own business. But if you find a good boss, then grab hold of them. And this is why I mentioned good bosses always have talent followings.

True.

They change jobs and they bring people with them because people are like, I don't care where I work, I care who I work for. Yeah. So I'm coming with this person.

Yeah. And I think, you know, what we've realized at our company is like, you're not really a leader if you are not going to bring people along with you. It's like the number one interview question I have for executives, which is, let's say that we have an ability to hire a couple of people underneath you. I'm not positive we do, but if we do, who Who do we have to bring from your other organizations in order for you to succeed? And I can always tell if they're going to be a good leader if they're like, I don't care, pay me slightly less, bring Bob, Sarah, and Matt. We need these three, or at least Bob. And if they can name nobody, then they're really just a manager that nobody wants to follow. And so it's almost the inverse too. Everything you hear about how to make your boss better is also how do you become a better leader and a boss.

Yeah, and the first thing I would say if you really gave me that challenge is I would say, look, I need these 3 people. Feel free to pay me less short-term until you're convinced because you'll want to pay me more long-term once you see what we do together. That's the like ironclad answer I think is my team and I will outperform. And I know you're big on performance incentives. I can take the bet that with this team, I have a better chance of hitting my own performance incentives, which is why I think we both believe in performance incentives.

Yeah, 100%. I'm curious, like, I know that there's a component of advocacy to getting promoted or getting passed on, but let's say, you know, you're listening to this and you just haven't been able to get a promotion or you're too scared to ask or you're ready for it, but you're not sure what to do next. What is the difference between somebody who will get promoted and somebody who will get passed on?

So I think the difference is not hard work. Lots of people work hard. Instead, it's does your work produce results? In the end, particular corporate America is based on returning money to shareholders. It doesn't care about anything else. It cares about driving profits, which means growth. So if you can figure out, as opposed to all the work that I could spend time on, what's going to drive up our results that matter. That can mean, of course, driving down costs. It can mean increasing revenue, making customers happy, but something that turns into money. You do those things that drive results, and in the end, results are what companies want more of. And so they'll promote to get results and they will promote even people they don't like if the results are enough.

Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah. If we flip the question and invert it, I guess my question for you would be like, what things should you never say to your boss if you want to make more money or get promoted?

I've seen people at Amazon actually tell Jeff Bezos, you run an evil company while working for it. Like, why are we evil? I had an all hands. A guy, you know, said, we seem to avoid taxes. Why are you such a tax dodger? You know, Jeff, Jeff was good about handling that question on stage. But obviously these are things you don't do. The other thing I think though is anything that makes you seem more out for yourself than understanding you have a role in the corporate good. Everyone knows that sure, you want to be paid more, but the thing not to say is what I, I, I want. And instead, here's what I'm going to do and I'd like to be rewarded as a part of that. Like, I'd like commensurate reward with the value I bring. That's what works. Talking about, well, I deserve more. I would like a fast promotion. Why aren't I moving up? The self-centeredness almost never works.

Yeah, it's a good point. I think it's counter to a lot of advice I hear on like TikTok these days. It's like, if you don't ask for what you want, you're not going to get it. And that is actually not true. I don't think by and large in good organizations, I feel like if you can show your results consistently, without asking for it, you can make more money. I mean, I see it. We promote people all the time and we give people salary increases all the time when we just see they're performing. Because as a leader, you're like, I don't wanna lose this person.

I don't wanna lose them. I want more of that. Yeah. And I want to also hopefully show, you know, I can't tell others that I gave that person a raise, but they'll figure it out. Yep. I want them to see who's getting a raise. Yeah. That said, I do think asking matters.

How do you do it? Reddit.

Yeah, there is a way to ask. My favorite way is don't bring it up as you versus your boss. Instead, Codie, if you were my boss, what I would say to you is not, "Oh, Codie, I want you to promote me," because that puts it, personalizes it. Instead, I would say, "You know, my career is naturally very important to me, and I would like to know how important it is to contrarian thinking. And why I need to know that is, unfortunately, if it's not as important to contrarian thinking as it is to me, then I need to take that in consideration. And I've done two things there. Number one, I depersonalize it. Now, you're the owner of contrarian thinking, so it's a little tighter. But if you were just a manager here, I've displaced it not as you versus me, but hey, I need to know what the company values me. That takes you out of it personally. And then I have very politely said, you know, if contrarian thinking isn't going to support me, then I have to consider if it's the right place for me. But I haven't ever threatened you. If I say, Codie, if you're not going to promote me, I'm going to bounce. Yeah, you're like, hmm, peace out. See? Yeah, exactly. I admired you because you're like, yep, good luck with that. The door is over there. You know, don't let it hit you.

Yeah. You know, it's interesting because I think you're right. That probably works well for non-owners. If somebody came to me and said that, I would say, "I don't know how to quantify that." I'd be like, "What do you mean important to me? I wouldn't hire you and pay you money instead of pay me money if I didn't want you at this company." Yeah. So how would you explicitly do it? And maybe not, I'll take my owner hat off and just pretend like I'm a manager, but do you have a script or a framework where you're like, "Say this if you want to make more money and show them this if you want to make more money." Yeah.

So first thing is I would time it to where I've delivered something, right? Don't, don't come in on a neutral note if you can avoid it, and certainly not after a problem. Come in on a high. And, and so then what I would say is I would say, hey, Codie, we just had some great results on the XYZ project, and I really appreciate the feedback you gave me. And what I'd like to do is I'd like to grow my career and know how I can deliver more of that from you. And as a part of that, I'd hope that I could get a promotion and, you know, a significant equity and compensation increase. Could we talk about what I could deliver where that would make sense for you?

So good. It's so good leading with the value and exactly what you get in order for the value and exactly what the company gets. Like, it's like if you show me you're going to make me more money, I'm giving you more money, no problem. And it's even easier, I think, at smaller companies, harder sometimes at bigger companies because you have all the budgets and things. Yes.

They have all kinds of rigidity levels and who are you comparing to and how many people do we need at that level and salary bands. Yeah, you're freed of all of that. If someone's super valuable and you think they're worth 20% more, or for that matter, 3 times as much, you can make that decision as the owner.

What's the most ridiculous thing most people don't understand about, like, pay in big corporations?

Oh, I would say one thing they don't understand in big corporations is how much variability there is. So one thing I did that Amazon wouldn't like, but I was playing both sides advocating for my employees. I had an employee who was making less than half what was possible in his role, and he got an offer from another huge company. So we were at Amazon. He got an offer from Meta that was a big raise, but I knew we could match it. And so I just coached him and said, look, you got to ask for this. And show your other offer and we'll get it for you. So bottom line, and these are big numbers, he went from making about $300,000 to making about $750,000 in one jump. Nice. That was because, you know, I was actually coaching behind the scenes to help him because I really wanted to keep them and I wanted to drive the Amazon corporate machine to make an offer to match Meta. We lost a lot of people to Meta because they outpaid us at that time. But what he didn't understand was any idea that was available. You know, he thought like, oh, there's no way Amazon will ever match this offer from Meta that doubled his pay. It was right there. And so I think people don't realize what's possible under the right conditions.

That's actually a great point because how many people leave? I mean, I remember early on in a company we had a, a young woman whose name I won't say, we'll make up Barbara or whatever, but she She left, and the reason she left, she was making $90,000 here and she was a junior content person and some bonuses, et cetera, to come with it. And she left for a $100,000 offer that was 1099 instead of W-2, so didn't come with health insurance and all the other things.

So it was worse, probably.

It was worse. But what was fascinating is one, She didn't realize the difference between— she just saw the $100,000 difference. And, uh, I think she actually liked her job. She just wanted to make more money and was a little scared to ask for it. One thing Ethan keeps coming back to is this: doing the work is not the same as owning the outcome. In my experience, there's no form of ownership more rewarding than business ownership. That's why we created something called Main Street Millionaire Live. It's a virtual event where we will show you how to find, fund, evaluate, and own cash flowing small businesses, exactly what we're talking about here. Having the ambition is one thing, but if you don't have the knowledge from experienced owners at every step of the game, you'll never actually do it. And so you got to figure out, you know, hey, are the numbers I got from this tire shop telling the full story? You know, is seller financing the right move? Could AI actually improve these margins? Ethan just told me that his trainer actually bought the gym that she worked for. At MSM Live, I'm going to break down how we've taught thousands of owners how to do this, how we've bought hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in businesses just from normal people, maybe like you, using creative financing and show you how to evaluate businesses like an investor. I think even if you wanna stay in corporate America, owning something on the side is how you change the game entirely. So if you wanna go full owner mode or just curious about it, grab your ticket below at msm.live. I'll see you there. Okay, back to my conversation with Ethan Evans. Had some management issues at the time. We didn't have a great leader on top of her, so that's my fault. But what was so interesting to me is if she had come to us and said, I want to just make this much more, here's a couple things I think I could do, is there any way to get there? We probably just would've said, yeah, let's right-size this. And again, that is our fault for not maybe continuing to right-size her as she grew proactively. Now we try to do that. But I think before you make a jump, just if you like what you do, asking and telling what you're going to do additionally, you might be shocked what you could get from your current company.

Well, so two things there, if I can point them out. First, what you said, if I can paraphrase, is we as the management should have been on top of that.

Well, true.

Yeah. So she was waiting for you to do what should have happened, but it didn't happen. So she just left. That's the mistake is She wasn't asking. Second thing is just statistically, 70% of employees never ask for a raise. This is probably foreign to me and you because we're a little aggressive, but 70% never ask. And yet of the 30% that do ask, 70% of them get something. They may not get what they ask for. So, oh, I want, you know, I want to go to at least $100,000. Well, Maybe they say, well, we can't do that. We can go to 97. And, but you get something. And so asking almost always pays off. And of course, you know this, we same way you teach your, all of your audience to negotiate for businesses. If you just ask, it's probably there.

Yeah, it's so true. You have this, this philosophy about invisible performers versus visible performers. Can you talk about how being visible and high versus invisible and mid can sort of change your career? Will you break down that philosophy?

Yeah, absolutely. So here's the basic idea. Most managers are trying to reward their top performers, but the thing people forget about managers, managers have their own career, their own life, their own partner and children. They're not noticing everything. And so if someone is doing a good job advertising their work, making it visible, they may be seen as a much higher performer than this person who's sitting silently. The number one thing I hear people tell me is, oh, I'm just going to keep my head down and work hard, and I expect my hard work will be rewarded. And I call this work hard and hope to be noticed. And to follow on to that, hope is not a very good strategy. So there are things you can do that are pretty simple to make your work visible. The most obvious in a corporate environment is just send out a status report. Just write a little note at the end of every week or put it in Slack and say, hey, here's what I've done this week. And compared to the people who don't do that, you'll— it's just like going in and offering help. They'll immediately jump to the front. I love to study psychology. And one of the things about psychology is humans can't avoid reading. Once we learn how to read, if you put words in front of us, our brain reads them. We can't basically not read. It's why billboards work. We're driving down the highway, we don't care, but there it is. And suddenly we know Chick-fil-A at the next exit, whether we wanted to know or not. The same thing happens with that status report. It comes into your inbox and like, oh, it's Ethan saying what he did this week. And somebody else, your Barbara, isn't there. And right there, week after week, what you're getting is, oh, Ethan worked, Ethan worked. Barbara, who's Barbara? And that's what happens.

Such a good point. Also, as a leader, I love status updates because I think one of the fears that your leader has and all leaders have is that their team actually isn't doing anything. And it is a fear, especially when you're an owner, you're like, I have these resources, they're finite. I have to allocate them, those. And then I got to go chase down, am I allocating them appropriately to the right people? And, you know, if you're any good at running a business, you're often thinking, well, I have a million bucks to put here or here. Which one is going to deliver me better performance? And even at a company as big as Amazon, you don't get unlimited budget. Nope. And so it's really interesting. Now I have almost all my direct reports Well, all my direct reports and then everybody who's working on key projects for me send a weekly update. But what is almost just as bad is when you say you're going to and then you don't do it weekly and then your manager has to chase you. I feel like that is, there's almost like, I don't know if you have a philosophy this, you've been doing this longer than I have. Why is that worse almost?

So, well, it's a busted expectation. In other words, if I didn't ask you for it or we didn't agree, then maybe I wanted it, but like I can't really blame you. Yeah, but when you say you're going to do it, then you don't, this is, this is letting me down. And it's a way that feels more personal, like you broke a promise. I actually say the same thing in The Magic Loop, which is the only way to screw up this loop is to go to your boss and say, how can I help you? And they say, oh, do this. And then you don't do it because that's much worse than if you just kept your head down and never gone in their office because they weren't thinking about you. But now you've put yourself on their on their horizon and let them down, and that they will remember that much more than if you had not ever showed up. So that status report you don't get when you're expecting it or when you've been clear that you want it, that's a much bigger black mark than someone who just doesn't do something on their own.

Yeah, that's really good. But what a simple way. Like if you want to make more money, what do you do? You send status reports weekly. You update your manager about what you're working on. You show the results that you've had and you call it being strategically annoying, basically. Absolutely. Are those the 4 or is there anything else that like if you want to make more money, you should absolutely do?

I mean, another good one is bring solutions or propose solutions. The last thing I would probably add to your shortlist is if I have a problem that I'm not sure how to solve or that needs your approval because we're going to spend money, make the case. Don't just come and say, "Oh, Codie, would you pick between A and B?" But instead, look, say, "We face A and B. It's a debate in the team. Here's the advantages of A. Here's the advantages of B. I recommend, but you tell me because in the end it's your money." What I'm doing there is making it super easy for you, but still letting you make the choice. Now, if you're a really strong lieutenant, if you've got— if I have a great relationship with you, I might be so bold. This is like playing the advanced level of the game to say, hey, Codie, we looked at A and B and I know how you think. And so I've gone ahead because of these reasons and made the call A. It is still reversible. If you disagree, call me back, but otherwise just know we're already running. And at this point you're like, this person is magic. They're doing what I would do for the reasons I would do it and making me money. And all I have to do is like, Well, nothing actually, right? Just read the email and collect the check. That's, that's where you're trying to get to. But that takes a relationship where I, where you and I have enough trust that I can make decisions for you by proxy. And I'm sure you have a few people like that. Definitely.

Well, why do you think it is that this is so rare too? I'm not sure how much more work it takes or how much more intelligence it takes, but it It's one, really rare, I think, for people to come with solutions, not problems writ large. And it seems really hard for people to come and actually take the responsibility to say, I'm going to do X or Y.

Well, a lot of people have a ton of fear of being wrong. I remember very early in my career, I was still in school. I was working on a project as a graduate student and I ran into a guy from our facilities department. We needed to do something like drill a hole in the wall. And I was like, let's do it here. And he said, it sticks with me like glue. He said, I ain't making no damn decision. Right? Like he was just terrified that someone would tell him you did it wrong. And he was much older than me. So I was just 18, 19, 20. And I'm like, I'll make the decision, do it here. So that's part of it is people are afraid of being wrong. And some of them have been smacked. For being wrong. How could you do that? You know, you didn't have the authority because there are controlling people who are afraid to delegate. And so they learn fear. The second thing is when it comes to like coming up with a solution or proposing something, I don't want to be blamed is a stronger thing than I see the reward. So I think what differentiates people at Amazon, we had an ownership leadership principle, which is part of how Amazon runs. It has a set of principles. And at one point they were considering removing it and I led the fight to keep it. And some of the words in it that I helped create say, "An owner never says, 'That's not my job.'" And what happens is people feel like, "Oh, making this decision or taking this risk, well, that's not my job. I'm a content producer or I'm a negotiator. It's not my job." And what we want, of course, as founders or leaders in a company is people who see, okay, I might not be the right person to do this work, but since nobody's doing it, I'm gonna jump on it either and do my best job or find who should own it. I'm not just gonna leave it there and be like, oh, not my job. You know, alligator arms, right?

T-Rex.

Yeah.

There's this great meme that I saw and it was like a little lifeboat and the lifeboat had holes in it over here and cracks there and a broken sail. And next to all the things that were wrong with it, there were people all around the boat. But next to all those issues, it was like, not my job. Somebody else will deal with that. I don't want to be the one to bring that up. Da da da. All these little excuses. And then it talked about how there are two types of people, sort of the people who fix and the people who ride. And the people who fix always end up being in charge and the people who ride always end up behind. And you have an idea that's a little bit like this, like two types of managers, umbrella managers versus funnel managers. What are the difference between the two?

Well, the basic idea is, you know, shit runs downhill and the manager is either an umbrella over the team kind of covering for that and getting it out of the way so that the team can work. Whereas funnel managers look like a funnel and they're catching all the crap, passing it by themselves, and like, hey, you deal with it. You know, my boss is mad about this, you'd better fix it. And my only job is to like pass the blame to you and then push you to work harder. So that's the main difference. And I've definitely seen both of these. Yeah, those are stories I can tell. They come in to a case where I failed Bezos. We can talk about that maybe later.

Tell me now. This sounds great.

I failed Jeff twice in my life, like big public failures. The first one was when we very, the very first time we began Prime Video, before it was even called Prime Video, we were going to start showing movie and TVs. And he asked us to come to an all hands of the company and demo the product. Well, to shortcut the story, I got on the stage and we had a bug, which happens with lots of software. And you probably know the old movie Office Space, like the red stapler scene. So we wanted to show that. And I'm standing there with microphone. Jeff's in the front row and all of Amazon is behind him. And I say, okay, so this is Office Space. And everybody starts laughing and it's, the scene's funny, but not that funny. I turn around and you can actually see me go and turn upside down because it's playing upside down on the screen. So I'm holding the mic. I'm brand new at Amazon. Here's Jeff Bezos and all of, you know, my chain of management. What do you say? And I said, well, obviously we have some problems. I'm going to go work on those. And the interesting part about this is Jeff has a lunch after the all-hands where he takes all the presenters to lunch. And so we get through this meeting, I go to lunch, I walk into the room, it's a big room, conference room size. And he's there alone. Well, it's just no one else has arrived, but like I bolt for the farthest possible seat, you know? And he sees me and he's like, no, no, no, come sit next to me. And I'm like, okay, shit's about to get real. He says, look, uh, he could have said anything. What are you going to do? What's the problem? Why did that happen? What he actually said was, I just want you to know I'm not worried about this problem because clearly you are. And then we had lunch, but of course that sent me back like, oh my God, Jeff Bezos is behind me, like super Energizer Bunny. And that became Prime Video. So the second story is where the umbrella manager comes in. Fast forward almost 10 years, I've risen in the company, I have a big team, we're launching something for Jeff and it doesn't, again, it doesn't work. And in this case, we've been working all night to launch it for a morning press release. Well, Jeff gets up and we haven't done the press release because it's not work. And so he's immediately on email and he says like, what's going on? And I replied to him, you know, he says, where's the press release? I replied to him and say, well, we have some problems. And I'm thinking, get in the shower, get on your treadmill, anything. I'm going to fix these problems. And he comes back and says, what problems? And starts auditing and digging. And my goose is cooked. Well, Jeff's mad. He's mad that we failed. It's reasonable, right? We've let him down. But one of his executives decides, not unreasonably, like, my job is to play the heavy for Jeff and make sure Ethan knows he fell short. So this number 2 in the company comes marching into our physical space. And the case of an umbrella manager, my boss was a guy named Paul Ryder. And Paul goes and puts himself physically in front of that manager and says, who's his direct boss, and says, "Look, if there's any problem here, address it with me. This is my team and I'm solely responsible." And that's an umbrella manager. Now, the funny part of this story is the executive says, "Paul, that is really good leadership and I appreciate that. Now, I need to talk to Ethan. Please step out of the way." So, it didn't work. But like, he made the try.

Oh my God, that would be so horrifying. I don't think— I mean, I remember when I was working in corporate, my like version of Jeff Bezos, his name was Jim Bowen, actually funny, JB. But, uh, he was so impressive to me that the idea of letting him down in anything was sort of crippling. And so, um, I could only imagine how you would feel being called out in public. Because Jim was pretty ruthless, in a good way though, about public feedback basically. And so I've sort of taken it under wing in that. Not everybody can handle it. I try to only do it to executive level, but he would kind of say in front of everybody, everybody's going to get to learn from this. That was wrong. This is a huge mess up and you have to fix it. And we're still friends to this day, I think, because to your point earlier, he would hold such high standards that I got so much better through that relentless sharpening, even though it sucked in the moment. And I think maybe a lot of people today don't realize what a gift it is to have people who are hard on you, because if they didn't think you were going to be able to fix it, they would've just been like, well, whatever. I'm not even going to talk to Ethan. He's not going to fix this.

That's right. Absolutely. And I know that in that case, there was a behind-the-scenes discussion of Do we need to remove Ethan here? Because this, this guy who was charging through Paul told me that later in a meeting, he said, we were discussing whether or not you could still be here, but the way you stepped up and the way you communicated, we gave you the space and you fixed it. So you still screwed up. Never do that again. Kind of, you know, pounding the lesson home, but you get to keep your job. And, you know, they were making a decision. And definitely it was like an eye-opening breath when he's like, well, we were considering whether or not to fire you.

Like, what, what do you think the right way is to give really difficult feedback to somebody so they actually listen to it?

Well, a couple things. Uh, privacy is better if it's going to be that hard. You like, it's— you're just going to lose trust from a lot of people if you have a we're considering firing you discussion in public. Everybody's really What kind of jerk are you? So it's got to be in private. But I think clarity— what happens with hard feedback is people are afraid of the potential confrontation. And so they don't want to say something that might get blowback like, well, that's not fair. This happened and that happened. They don't want the argument. What I've learned to do is I call it being professionally firm while being personally warm. So what I would do in a case like this with you is I would say, Codie, I need to discuss something that's going to be difficult. And I want you to know that, like, I'm always behind you. I'm telling you this in order that you can succeed. That said, this last screw-up didn't show enough attention to detail, and we can't have any more of them. And I need to tell you, this does, you know, more of this is not compatible with staying here, right? Or I could use other words, right? But could lead to the end of your job, and I don't want that for you. And so the trick is to show human warmth for the fact they care about you, but a very unmistakable line of this performance doesn't fly. And most people, if you've built the trust to where you believe that I do want to help you, then you can hear almost anything if you believe it's coming from a position of help. If you believe it's coming from a position of condemnation, that wasn't good enough, I need better, you— I start pointing my finger and like, you didn't, you this, you that, and I'm not involved. And the reason a lot of people do that, they get into the blaming style, is they can't risk confrontation without getting themselves worked up first so that they're ready for a fight. Because if you push back, you're like, "That's not fair and you're not supportive," you know, they don't know how to handle that and say, "Well, we can talk about that, but this is still the objective performance." They can only do that if they're ready for a fight and that makes them aggressive, which you feel.

Do you feel like a lot of people get feedback? Like, do most managers have hard conversations with their team?

So according to what everyone says, no, right? The constant feedback, just like I said earlier, managers don't get asked if they want help. Almost every employee will say, "I don't get any real feedback." There are some reasons for this. The biggest thing though is as a manager, I'm busy asking myself, "How important is this feedback?" Versus if I make you upset, do I want to deal with that? And then what if you quit? Like, how do I give you this feedback in a way that you feel like, okay, I've got to address it, but I can, as opposed to, oh, that meant get out and now I'm going to have a hole. So they're trying to figure out how to like, well, it's called sandwich feedback, right? I'm going to say something nice to you, then I'm going to slip in a little bit of like, oh, you could do this better. And then I'm going to say something else nice. Well, the problem with that is most people, they hear that there's a criticism in there, but they don't hear, actually, I have to change. I have to do something different. They don't hear that part. And that's, again, managers aren't trained to do this. Well, let's look at your corporations. You know, when you worked in corporate history, how many of your managers had actual training, would you say, in how to be good managers versus they were just top performers on the trade desk or wherever and got moved up?

The only company I think did a really good job of that was Vanguard. Vanguard has like pretty incredible corporate training. So yeah, probably less than half for sure.

Yeah, and I would say it's normally even less than that, is that a top performer in an individual role gets made a manager because they want it and they're good at what they do. And so it's assumed, oh, you're a good engineer, you're a good designer, you can manage designers. Well, there's no proof that. And even if it is true, you certainly haven't been told how to give good feedback. And so you're left, you know, there are cases where I've hurt people because I had to learn on the job and I did it badly because I didn't have the skills and the training. And so to your point of feedback, I once had in my very first job, one of the very first performance reviews I ever gave, I thought very deeply about where can this person improve and what do they do well. And I gave this— I was young and this employee was older than I was, which is already awkward. Like I'm reviewing someone, you know, significantly my senior. Well, I did, in my opinion, a pretty good job actually noting strengths and weaknesses. What I didn't at all do was understand the relationship dynamic here. And so I pissed him off and he fought me and undermined me the rest of my career there because I, you know, I embarrassed him, right? Here's this young kid telling me I need like, you know, he— because I wasn't trained in how to give that feedback, to build the relationship, to say, hey, could I share a couple of things? You know, could I share a couple of things to help you? Which is the last point I'll make. It's a great trick. Ask for permission. I can come to you and say, "Codie, could I share a couple things I've noticed? Would you like some feedback?" Great trick here. You're almost never going to say, "No, actually, I'd rather blunder forward blindly." It's a very good point. But then once you say yes, you also can be like, "Oh, I don't want to hear that." So it kind of sets you up for being open to it because you opt in.

What about political correctness in a corporation and politics in a corporation? And Lord, we've seen a lot of that over the last, let's call it, 10 years. Yep. How do you manage that in a company and what do you allow or not allow?

I'm a big believer that what the leader exemplifies is what they get. So if they see political correctness and they say, well, that's very politely worded, but please share what you really think, that will encourage more transparency. So I think saying, oh, we don't do political correctness, don't do that, is tougher than exemplifying. Bezos had this thing where he taught, we don't want people to succumb to what he called social cohesion. And he wanted people to be willing to debate. And so he exemplified that. And the big example was he would tolerate debate. I had a manager, a vice president who was arguing with Jeff about something and the CFO, 'cause it was going on and on a little bit, stepped in and said, Jeff, do you want me to shut this down? Like right in front of my boss. Basically, do you want me to tell him shut up so that you don't have to? And Jeff said, no, this is how we learn. And they went 6 more rounds. Of course, Jeff still won because he's the CBO, but he explained his logic and defended it. And later that day, I heard other leaders broadcasting that example of you wouldn't believe what happened today. Jeff agreed to go extra rounds with his VP because he said, this is what I want. I want people who will push back. Those examples spread. That's actually what I would call good gossip, that storytelling of, look, the leader is for real. The leader really does want this. So that's how I think you get rid of political correctness is you have to live it and you have to get your leaders to live it. And then if they live it, it will die. The temptation to be afraid to say anything and we have to be super inclusive and bring everybody into a big group hug. I don't want to exclude anyone, but I also don't have time to come around and, you know, sort of politely say, do you have anything to add? Yeah. You know, say it or don't. Yeah. And it's not— again, I respect there are quieter people and give space, but only to a degree.

Yeah. What are the career killers that you can do that people will remember forever in their jobs?

Betrayal is the number one. Any sort of— and to some degree, that's the letting me down where you promise something like I'm counting on something and then it doesn't show up and it makes me look bad. Anything that hits people's ego or identity is actually more than raw performance. If you lose me money, I'm upset. But if you make me look bad, I'm furious, even if I can't admit it. Right? So if you leave me hung out to dry where I feel foolish or I feel incompetent. That's going to be the number one thing. The second thing is anything that leads me to distrust you more generally. I see you, you know, cheating on an expense report or behaving inappropriately. Again, anything that makes me question you as a human being is probably deeper than things that make me question your performance, because performance, maybe you can get better, maybe I can train you. Maybe you can learn. Whereas if I start to distrust you, there's really no path back from that, right? It's a little bit like how many marriages recover when a partner cheats, right? It's just usually kind of over. Yeah, same thing.

Yeah, it's true. I don't think people realize the harm that happens from like lying, cheating, stealing. And that betrayal component. You know what the other one is actually too? The gossiping. I feel like leaders—

Breaking trust though. It's not maintaining my confidence, it's another betrayal.

Oh yeah, that's true. That's true. You see it a lot in corporate cultures, but the, we're going to gossip about this person, but then present another face, I think is a really fast way for you to get fired or to never be put in a position of power. And it's interesting because I had a meeting with some of my leaders, there's a little gossiping going on from some of their teams. And I had to sit down with them and say, you know, one of my favorite rules from Dave Ramsey's company when I went and went to his headquarters, and I have a lot of respect for Dave in many ways, is they have a no gossip policy. It's really aggressive at their company. And if you do it and another team member hears you do it, they'll just say, hey, we don't do that here. But if it happens another time, you're let go from the company. And I said, I really, I don't think this is by and large a good philosophy because it can be really toxic. And one of the leaders said, gossip is just natural. And I said, it is, you're right. But if we are the ones that stop it every time, it will become a lot less natural. And so I think you have to be okay saying, hey, we just don't do that here. We don't have the energy for it. That's not part of our corporate culture. If you want to gossip about things, don't do it here. That's really not going to be who we are. But even given that feedback in real time, I think is really hard. And yet it's how you progress.

Well, the closer, the closer a piece of feedback is to the event, the more likely it is that'll change. Like holding it, you can hold it in private if necessary, but as soon as you can pull someone aside, because a day or two later it just doesn't connect the same way. This is the whole Like if we touch a hot stove, we learn very quickly not to do that. But there's no one who smokes who's unaware smoking is bad for you. The thing is, it's bad for you 20 or 30 years from now. And so that long feedback means that no one, you know, that's a someday problem that might happen. The same thing with feedback is if I did something and then I'm telling you like, hey, last week you gossip and you're like, what? What did I say to who? Oh, really? It's just— it's too faint. So it is tough to say, hey, just quickly, we don't do that here. I do think leaders need to be strong on the culture if they want it, because the culture you exemplify is the culture you get, for sure.

Let's talk about that, because you were at one of the greatest companies of all time, certainly of our lifetime. What is your take on that? Like, what is the culture of Amazon that led to such massive performance?

So there's a couple things. Number one, Amazon was unabashedly hard driving, and some people definitely with justification would call it a sweatshop. But it was very clear that Amazon was a place where you were expected to work very hard, and it was okay if that wasn't for you, no problem, go somewhere else. But we are not going to slow down or lower our expectations. We won't be, you know, probably judge you a little if you leave, to be honest. But the truth is, like, we'd rather you leave than you stay here and complain about it. So part of it was hard work. The second thing though is Amazon was really great on pushing authority to do things down and giving autonomy to small teams. They had this idea called a two-pizza team. And the idea was that no team should be bigger than can be fed by two pizzas., and that team should know what it's all about and be able to go do it itself. So, what they tried to— the way to understand Amazon is not, oh, a million employees, but rather 100,000 of these little teams. And so, it was in many ways a collection of startups. Like, my first team that built this version of Prime Video that failed at the demo was only 7 people. When it began, we were told, go figure out how to put Amazon in the online video business. Now, that same team today, the whole team globally would be several thousand, but it's still going to be divided into these little pieces working on each individual part of the larger system now. And that's what made Amazon strong is you had these little teams. Jeff, in fact, got a lot of pushback on this that's worth sharing. We brought in a VP from Microsoft, big platform company, and that guy had an argument with Jeff who said, "So many of these teams are repeating work. This independent team is doing things similar to this one, and this one's building overlapping technology. Why don't we have a platform team, you know, and we'll make everything central and we'll organize it centrally?" And Jeff thought about it and thought about it. And he wrote on the board a math equation, 2 is greater than 0. And he said, I'd rather pay to get 2 of something because I find when I force people to collaborate too soon, they gridlock and argue about priorities. And what I actually get is nothing. And so I'd rather pay for 2 than get 0. And if we're so lucky as to get 2 working things, that's a first-class problem we'll deal with later. As opposed to trying to force central planning on this huge organization and getting nothing.

Interesting. A lot of people talk about burnout and work-life balance. You were able to work at a lot of these companies for a long time. Like, how do you work really hard to make a ton of money without burning out?

Burnout is less, it turns out, about hard work, although you can overwork to the point physical exhaustion. It's more about losing your vision. You no longer know why, you no longer know where you're going. The great thing about Amazon, as I mentioned, is we had lots of autonomy. And so you could feel like, I know my mission, it's to build Amazon Video, Prime Video, or it's to build the gaming efforts. And I'm in charge of my own destiny. I'm a little bit of a mini CEO. And people under me own their own pieces. So I feel like I'm in control and sure, I'm working really hard, but I'm not laboring without reward or clarity. And that's the bigger cause of burnout. Now, I guess one thing I share with people, you do have to set your own boundaries, not just at Amazon, but anywhere. It goes back to that corporations are driven by profit. And while you as a leader in a small company might be enlightened enough to say to somebody, hey, you're burning yourself out, like I'd rather you dial it down and not burn out. Big corporations are machines. And if I'm paying you $100,000 and you'll work 50 hours, great. But if you'll work 60, even better. And if you'll work 70, why wouldn't I let you? And the corporate machine doesn't have any sense of like, oh, you're working 110 and you're losing weight and, you know, The machine doesn't know. And so you have to protect yourself and say, you know, 60 is my limit because the corporate machine will just say, this is a great deal. You're working twice as much as anybody else for the same money. I love it. It will in fact lure you in because you'll say, oh, here's a high performer. I'll give you a raise and a promotion. And so it encourages you keep sacrificing your health and I'll keep paying and promoting you. It will never stop and it will drive you. It will let you drive yourself right off a cliff. So you have to draw that line.

So how do you figure out what boundaries you need to set to still make a ton of money but not burn yourself out?

Well, most work is wasted. So this is about calling your shots. I would even challenge you, you know, what were you doing last Tuesday morning? Yeah, you don't know. Neither do I. The point being, most of our work is wasted. The way to be effective is to be better at ruthlessly looking at what's going to return money, where are the priorities. I know you talk to people correctly about have metrics, have a quick report that shows what's moving the needle and what isn't. Most people don't have that. And so they're just working on whatever came in in their email and whatever someone else is asking for. They're not really dialed in on, I own this business, whether internal to a company or I own my own small business, what are my key metrics? And is this work really about that metric or is it just something someone else wanted me to do?

It's such a great point. Yeah, I think the thing that helped me was I started call— I call my CEO every day who's Mark. I don't know if you've met him like him. I call him every morning and I say, this is what I'm working on. And obviously I have longer-term priorities and a to-do list and all of that, but it's a check-in with somebody else. I'm like, I think these are my top 3 priorities. Has anything changed in the business that I need to pivot from this? And because I can talk myself into just about anything or I can let the day happen to me. And so my husband, he prefers to talk to his little AI. So every morning he's like, I have the stack ranking, give me my top 3. And then he sees if he's right or the AI is right on like what he thinks he should be executing on that day. But otherwise you become no longer the architect of your day, but rather, you know, a construction worker on the site. And you might be building the roof before the foundation, which is problematic.

Or frankly, you know, getting more water. Yeah, right. But I thought you said something really interesting there. Which is you're no longer in control of your day. You're letting your day happen to you, were your exact words. That's where most people burn out and overwork is they're letting the day happen to them and they're very busy but low impact. And that's the big difference between what gets people promoted. It's also what lets people work only, you know, I think we probably both at least know of Tim Ferriss. I mean, for sure. Yeah. You know, the whole 4-Hour Workweek theory. I never got down to a 4-hour workweek, but the point was what's actually going to make a difference and what else is just filling up your day with someone else's nonsense. And that's why I asked, what did you do last Tuesday? In hindsight, if you were to go back and look at your calendar, maybe Tuesday you're like, oh, we nailed it. But maybe be like, you know, a week later, eh, if I hadn't done that, it probably wouldn't have mattered. That auditing your past of how much did I waste and being relentless of I'm not going to let that happen again. I'm not going to let somebody pull me in. To waste work makes a huge difference.

You're an engineer by background, right? I am. Yeah. I mean, it seems very systems thinking of you. And with our team, I was realizing, for instance, we held an event and we had one of our event planners, I saw she was potting succulents for the event. And I thought, wow, what is our prioritization that we think becoming florists is the highest priority for a business acceleration event. Buy some flowers, hire somebody to bring them in. Wow, how have I miscommunicated so badly what our priorities are that that's where we're spending our time? And so it is interesting. You almost have to systems think everything you do every day as far as what are your main— I don't really believe in one North Star because I think it could take your business too far in one direction or the other. We call them the two oars. So sort of what's our quantitative and qualitative metric to make sure we have like good top of funnel and good conversion in whatever we do. But every day I'm sort of asking myself, is it— is the thing that I'm doing leading to one of the two ors? And if it's not, why do I think that's my top priority? I guess I'd be curious. I mean, I have to ask you about the goat, but like, what do you see Jeff Bezos do differently than everybody else as a leader?

Yeah, so Jeff had a few things. He really did differently. I think the biggest thing I take away is a little bit complicated, but he often said we need to be strategically patient but tactically impatient. And what he meant by that was really valuable things take time to build. So his signature business, of course, is Amazon Web Services. Well, now it's, you know, over 15 years old. It took a long time to become this big billion-dollar business. And now hundreds of billions. So you had to work on it for a long time. That's being strategically patient, tactically impatient though, as he pressed those teams every day of what did you get done today? How did you move us closer? Yeah. So it's feeling this urgency of how have I moved my business forward as far as I possibly can today? And yet realizing that building something of real value might take 10 years, building something of enduring value. He was really good at that. You know, I learned so much from Jeff. I can certainly go on if you'd like.

Yeah, tell me more.

So, Jeff was often asked, and I think this is a really good question for the era of AI, he was always being asked as a technology leader, what's gonna be different next year? What's gonna be invented? And he had this insight where he said, you know, that's an interesting question, but I prefer to try and think about what's not going to be different. Because if I know something is this going to be the same next year and the same 5 years from now, I can build a business on that without worrying about the sand shifting. So his big insight about Amazon's retail business where you buy things as opposed to AWS was, look, customers are always going to want 3 things. They're always going to want lower prices. They're always going to want more choices, more selection, more options. And they're always going to want more convenience, which sort of translated to faster delivery. So if you look at Amazon's history, it greatly broadened what it sells. It pushes to have the lowest price and it sped up. You know, first there was free shipping, but it was slow. Then there was Prime, then there was One Day Prime, then there was same day. He said those three things are never going to change about people. And so I can build a business by focusing on what's not going to change.

That's great insight. What did you personally take away from working with him? Like, how did he make you a better leader? Or what did you take where you're like, God, I've never heard that before and now I'm going to do that?

Jeff and his team developed the idea of focus on the customer, not the competition. Be relentlessly focused on what your customer needs and the competition will take care of itself. It will do it, it won't. So many people get so, particularly in big business, and Amazon can get into like, well, what's Microsoft doing and what's Google doing and what do we need to do to stay ahead of Meta? And that's all kind of churn. You're guessing, you don't know, you're starting these hypey efforts 'cause they're starting hypey efforts. Jeff's viewpoint was, we have customers, what do they need? How do we invent something new on their behalf? So a signature invention there would probably be the Amazon Kindle. He could see like, "Oh, music has gone to MP3s. Movies are starting to go online. What's going to happen to books? Oh, they're going to become digital. People aren't going to want to read them on their computer. We need to do better." And that was his relentless focus on books are our business. We ought to figure out how to invent the next generation books. And that was him thinking about what does his customer need.

I saw this line from Elon Musk that I loved. It was basically like, the line was something like, "As a leader of a company, your job is basically to see through the continuous compounding lies in the business and find the truth." And I think what he meant is you have all these reports coming up to you that are a representation of what people want you to know and also what they think. And neither of those things may be total truth. And I could only imagine at a company as big as the ones that you've been at, how real that is. Like, as a leader, how do you find the truth in your business units and how do you figure out where the series of like compounding lies is, if you even agree with this sentiment?

I completely agree with compounding lies. You said earlier you could talk yourself into anything. Well, this is a company doing it at a larger scale, talking themselves into believing their own PR, talking themselves into, oh, this is a great idea. It's manifest destiny. I think the way Jeff partly got at this was driving hard on the numbers. So, okay, well, if it's manifest destiny, you know, show me the numbers. Like, what are the trends? Or not like what's the market research, but then what are we seeing He would wait a very long time for a business to go profitable if he could see the line. But if the line wasn't leading there, he would be very hard on like, hey, you know, this line never gets there. Like it never comes into the, you know, what's the plan? He would drill really hard on the numbers. The second way though, I think you figure this out is you go talk to people on the front line. You go talk to the individual engineers or the individual people delivering the services because all the managers in between are kind of reporting up things that make them look good. They're not trying to lie, just no one wants to be the bearer of bad news. It's unpleasant. If you go all the way down, so I always maintain some contacts with people many levels below me. When I had a big team, I would still talk to people who were 5, 6 levels in this giant organization removed from me. And that's because they would tell me things that I, you know, just wasn't expecting or had no idea. And you get this little bite of reality through all these layers of filters. You know, Jeff hated PowerPoint and the famous story why it's old now, but when the space shuttle Challenger exploded, they went and found the PowerPoint slide had been used to justify the launch. And this PowerPoint had like 7 levels of nested bullets. And the tiniest bullet in the smallest font basically said, we have a launch risk that could make it blow up. And every bullet going outwards, you can go find this slide, made that a little nicer. And of course bigger. So if you look at the headline, it's like launch readiness. Shuttle ready to go, you know, man, it got slightly more real and smaller font of like some pre-launch issues. And as you got down, it finally in the tiny font was like, hey, you know, if this goes wrong, it'll blow up. But all of the stuff above it had been, we're ready to launch. Looking backwards, it was clear Jeff felt that the slideware had misled the decision makers. And he got that idea from a professor who analyzed it, but he brought that to us and said, we're not going to do that. We're not going to bury things in slides.

Is it just easier to bury things in slides because of the graphic nature as opposed to in a brief? All text is sort of equalized.

That's partly it, but there's two more things going on. I want you to think a minute about the name Microsoft PowerPoint. Even if you use Google Slides, it came from PowerPoint. What was it about? Its name is about making powerful points. So it's a sales tool. So in that case, and in most others, the people running the slides, A, they're controlling the narrative, and B, they're using it to make their points. So the Amazon meeting style was to start with a 6-page narrative. So 6-page narrative, 6 pages of writing. Yes. There's no way to make one thing bigger than the other. But the other thing is, and this is a weird thing about our meetings, everyone would sit quietly and read for 20 or 25 minutes out of an hour. And you'd see these, Jeff and everyone else with a pen making notes on the document. But it was a way to drive deep thinking without someone at the front of the room controlling the pacing and telling you what to think. Instead, you had to think on your own. And that, Jeff told me once, you asked what I learned from him. He said, "Whenever I read one of these documents, I stop on every sentence and ask, 'Do I believe that?'" Okay. Now I'd read another, "Do I believe that?" And so he was constantly questioning, like, "Do I believe what this is saying?" And there was no one in his ear kind of moving it along saying, "Yeah, make a decision. You can see it's going to make us money." he could just think quietly to himself.

It's really good. It's actually, we did steal, I mean, everybody steals everything from Amazon, but we did steal this. Our leadership meetings were becoming really circular and they were losing all their signal to noise. And we were saying so many things, but really transferring very little knowledge. And so we started with a leadership brief. We only take 10 minutes to read it. So maybe we could expand upon that. But what what happens after that? I don't think a lot of people talk about— we all have talked about the Amazon brief, but then who controls what happens next? And are there different people in the room that have different roles in the meeting?

Good question. There aren't different people with different roles. The another thing I learned from Jeff, he always spoke last because he realized very quickly that even though he wanted strong leaders who would disagree with him, Once the great Jeff Bezos says, I like this idea, everyone else is more or less going to line up behind that. And so, fun story, we used to play a game, which is, can we get Jeff to speak out of turn? Because we knew, because we wanted our project approved or whatever, if we could get Jeff to say something, the rest of the room would kind of quiet down. But Jeff knew, you know, Jeff was very good at staying quiet. And sometimes I'll talk about other people in the room, but sometimes the whole discussion would happen and then Jeff would come in at the end and say, "I love this. We should do it." And you'd be like, "Oh, why'd we have to go through all that?" But there was a good reason for it. Other times he would come in at the end and say, "No, this is not. Here's my 3 thoughts." But other people in the room were expected, whenever you were in one of those rooms, you were expected pretend it was your business and that your goal was to figure out what was being described in this document and was it a good idea or not and how could you improve it? And then give your best thinking. Now, it wasn't meant that you should just always talk. Some people wouldn't say a lot, some people would, but, uh, we, there wasn't any particular speaking order. What would happen is after it was all read, we would actually say, it's another super detailed thing, "Should we go line by line?" And so you would start reviewing the document from the top and the person who owned the document or the meeting will be like, "Any questions on the first paragraph?" If there were, you discuss them. "Any questions on the second or any comments?" And it was very methodical. And I think that's also why Jeff felt it was better than PowerPoint. I'm not sure exactly how many words are in 6 typewritten pages, but it's thousands. If you think about the typical PowerPoint deck, 5 or 10 words a slide, maybe 15 slides. I'm giving an update on my business that's, you know, 300 words. It's very superficial. These narratives were very dense and they often had appendices as well, like extra information. In case you had a question like, oh, here's the whole financials of the business, or here's all the mockups. So it's very, very detailed.

And would you do that at every type of meeting that you have at Amazon?

It was not every meeting. It would kill you. But it was every meeting that was a big product decision or big product update. So it was our annual plan every year and any proposal for a new product, a new, business. I started a couple different businesses at Amazon where I had to write these 6-pagers and say, I want to start a business. One of the businesses I helped start was our t-shirt printing business. So I had to justify like, hey, we've never printed t-shirts before. Why is this a good idea and why should we do it? And what's going to be the consequences? And 3 of us worked together to create that 6-page brief. Now, that's a more than billion-dollar business at Amazon. But it started with a 6-pager.

I mean, I'm sure you're used to it by now, but how cool is that? How many businesses you've built? I mean, I think I just used Prime Video last night. How many people do you think you've touched with Prime Video?

It's got over 100 million, I think, active monthly users.

Yeah. And then— and that's— I don't even know how many billions of dollars that thing does. Then you've got this other business that does $1 billion a year. How many billion-dollar businesses do you think you've built inside of Amazon?

I've tried to count that up before 'cause of course I'm curious and I think it's about 5. That's cool. 5 or $6 billion business, t-shirt printing, some of the sponsorship business at Twitch TV. So the gaming website, Prime Video, Prime Gaming, and I ran the Amazon Appstore, which was a billion-dollar-plus business. So those are 5 different, businesses. And of course they're all over the place, right? The thing I love about Amazon is video game, you know, social media sponsorships and t-shirts. Like you can work in so many varieties. And that's why I say corporate life can be your training ground to then go out in the world. When I think about my own business, which is training and coaching, one of the things I do is steal from video games. Video games, um, I'll try not to go on too much length, but they have this idea in free-to-play games. Do you play any games on your phone ever?

A little bit. I'm not a gamer.

Yeah, I'm not a gamer.

I mean, I do it just to see how they work so that our tools get better. Like I'll mess with Duolingo because the gamification is so good and it makes people actually want to learn something that's pretty miserable, aka languages.

Yeah. So in most games, they have several levels where you can pay. You can pay a little bit to get something small and you can pay more. And the idea here is you're stratifying people from, I don't want to pay at all. I'm just going to, you know, sit back and play the free game too. Oh, I'll spend a little bit of money because that's what I have or how much I like it too. I love this. I want everything and I'm going to open my wallet and dump it all out for you. Well, the great thing about the virtual world is you can— you don't have to have one price fits everyone. It's not like, you know, a Ford F-150 is $30,000 and that's the price. It's like you have the choice to sell the same truck for $1,000 to someone who that's all they'll pay and $1 million to someone who wants the luxury version. I learned all that in video games. I use it all in what I do today where I have different offerings at different levels. The real point here though is The things I learned at Amazon make running my own small business way easier because I've seen this big scale. And I think that's probably— you took some lessons you use here from all your time on Wall Street.

Oh yeah. I mean, there's no way this company would be successful and we're still tiger by the tail only 5 years in, you know, but if I hadn't been in corporate for a long time because I learned how to take money and make more of it. I learned how to— how do I have risk collars? What's an appropriate level of risk to make? How do I attract A-players and keep them, especially the really good ones? And I mean, you're a perfect example. You're obviously hyper-qualified, could and have started your own business, but you ended up staying at these companies for a long time. And so I guess one of my last questions for you might be like, what does it take to attract A-players? How do you get people who are better than you to work for you besides just paying them millions of dollars? Mm-hmm.

I think it's mission clarity. People want— you know, we talked again about Arthur Brooks. People want to know why what they're doing is going to be interesting, exciting, world-changing. It doesn't have to be world-changing in all ways, but it has to be somehow I'm making a mark that's going to be remembered. You mentioned Elon Musk. While I was at Amazon, I got a call to go work at SpaceX. I'm very transparent, so I went with a little bit of hesitation. I went, told my boss, hey, I'm going to be gone tomorrow and I don't lie to you. I'm going to go interview at SpaceX. And it was really funny because my boss said, oh yeah, I've talked to him about a job at Tesla. We didn't get along, but you go see if it works for you. I was like, okay, well, you know, the fact my boss had gone for an interview, okay, now I'm on good ground. Well, it wasn't a fit for me either. But the point about A-players is my explanation to my boss was, look, Elon Musk is trying to put people on Mars. That's putting my name in the history books of the world. If that's the right job for me, I have to go for that. And even if you, you know, I was worried my boss would be mad at me. That I was going to go interview somewhere else. I said, "Look, I mean no offense. You know I love Amazon, but right now my job at Amazon won't put my name in the history books of the Earth, and this job with Elon might. And so I have to go see." Now, wasn't the right fit, but I think that level of mission, I jumped in a heartbeat if it had been the right fit because of that chance to make such a difference. And I think people need to see that somehow, which is you're not just paying me for my time. If you just want me for my time, you're gonna have to pay a lot more. Yeah. It's gotta be so much money that I'm telling myself, well, the difference is my yacht's gonna be amazing. Right.

Also, who wants a yacht? That I don't understand. I mean, much love to Bezos and his, I guess, you know what, if I was as famous as he was, I'd probably want a yacht cuz people never leave you alone. But, um, The monetary thing's never been that interesting for me, actually. I like money, don't get me wrong. I like it a lot. I want it. Love our company making a lot of it. But if that is the only reason why to keep working, that would be super boring to me.

And that's not his reason at all. Yeah. You have to understand, for people like Jeff, all costs are zero. Exactly. Right? He spent, I think, $500 million on that yacht. He's worth, you know, $200 billion more. Like, all costs are zero. So what's the difference? But that's not why he works. He's trying to make— he's in fact said he's trying to work on things that only his grandchildren will see value from. He's trying to work on things with a long-term horizon. Now, whether or not you agree with him and what his priorities— separate issue. But he's driven by a vision of the future he's trying to create, one he doesn't even believe he'll survive to see.

Yeah, that is another level.

Mm-hmm.

How can you tell if somebody is an A-player or not? I mean, how many people do you think you've interviewed?

Over 10. I've interviewed— Amazon keeps good records on this. I've interviewed over 2,500 people. I've gone through, I estimate, about 10,000 resumes, but I know I've done 2,500 interviews in my career.

So how do you tell who is going to be an A-player, who is not?

Oh, I wish I could do it perfectly because, of course, I've mis-hired people. The biggest thing we've learned to look at, and with leaders you can do this more because they have some sort of track record, is almost always looking what they have done predicts what they are gonna do. Yeah. So how much can you dig into that? My favorite trick for figuring out A-players is everybody knows to give 3 references if you ask. My trick was I would call a reference and say, hey, who else knows this person that I could call? And that way I would get out of their list of chosen references cuz they know somebody else who knows them and they'd be like, oh, well, Codie Sanchez worked with him. And then I would call you and you're not expecting a call. You haven't agreed to give a reference, but I'd say, I am considering hiring, you know, whatever, Mark Smith. I know you worked with Mark. Would you give me a little bit of insight? And usually you'd be the one if you're like, Mark is awesome. Whereas you're like, well, I could talk about Mark. That was my real way to tell who was an A-player is what were people who weren't sort of the listed references going to say about them? Plus, what were their accomplishments?

It's not even the interview process. It's like the follow-up process afterwards for references that really shows.

In the interview, you also get information. Basically, in the interview, I'm getting enough information to know, are you worth making all those calls, right? Do I see the signs that you've done good work? You can explain your work. You face hard decisions. So I was often hiring leaders. A big question, to your point about hard feedback, is have you ever had to let someone go? Walk me through that. Because it's sort of a watershed moment for a leader. Have they sat down across from someone and said, I'm sorry, but today is your last day with our company, and dealt with that? Because it's the ultimate hard message. So it risks the person freaking out. You know, I remember an employee that we terminated who, you know, started shattering things at his desk. And, you know, he's— and fear of that reaction means it's very hard. That— so if people have gone through that, it's one big signal. So I would get some of those signals in the interview, but then the final follow-up was, are they really that good? I remember at least one case early in my career at Amazon. Where we got— we were discussing the candidate at the end of the day and we realized we had missed something. And I called the candidate at his hotel and said, hey, we missed something. Can I come to your hotel and ask you a few more questions? Sadly, we didn't end up hiring the candidate. Another super interesting case, we were debating an executive candidate, a vice president, and Amazon had this idea of what was called a bar raiser. So a bar raiser was someone who wasn't going to work with the candidate. They sat outside the team and their job, because they weren't invested in the hire, they didn't have a hole to fill, they could sit outside it and really evaluate the process. Well, the team was debating, was unsure, uh, and I Googled the guy and the first result was him badmouthing his previous company. Yeah. But again, this is digging beyond the interview. Yeah. Right? You got to, like, in the interview, he seemed like a well-spoken person and we were getting close to hiring. And then when I just said, hey, why don't we stop for a minute and look at this? Like, everybody read this link. He was done. Yeah. So another rule, never, you asked what you can do to really, you talked about gossip. Well, gossiping about your company. Whenever I speak about things Amazon, Amazon doesn't do well, I'm very diplomatic about it.

100%.

Because Amazon made my life and I understand that in a company that size, there have been bad managers because there's literally a million managers in the company. I'm sorry, 100,000 because there's a million employees. You're going to have some bad eggs and they've done some awful things. But overall, that company is miraculous.

This.

And they're also transparent. This is our hardworking culture. If that's not you, please move on.

Yeah, I totally agree with that. I feel the same way. Like, if you say one negative thing about your employee, like your past employer in the interview, even if it is Joseph Stalin, like, I don't want to hear about it because you always know the best predictor of future behavior is past. So if you're talking badly about this, you're going to talk badly about us. And that's just sort of how it goes. And even hopefully when I talk, I'm like, "Well, this employee did this, but that was my fault because I didn't catch it." So that taking ownership portion is so important if you actually want to be perceived as a winner. And I know when I worked at Vanguard and Goldman and State Street, all really big companies.

Enormous.

Right. Nothing as big as Amazon, but I don't talk badly about them except to say when I wasn't a culture fit.

Right.

Like Vanguard for me was too communal.

Mm-hmm.

And they have a culture of, you know, if you stay there forever, you're very unlikely to get fired and you can have really continuous growth, but quite slow for, for comparative to a Goldman.

Yeah.

Which would be very fast. But if you're not very good, you're, you're gone, you know, 20% every year. And I preferred the Goldman to the Vanguard. Now that does that mean Vanguard's bad? No, it's an incredibly profitable company forever. But Goldman just fit me. And so, I do think it also shows really incredible A-player mentality for you to say, "This culture just wasn't the right culture for me." Yep.

And that's exactly— there'd be a lot of people who'd be like, "Codie, how can you speak well of a place that cut 20%? What a brutal, capitalistic, awful, blah, blah, blah," and trying to lure you into saying, "Oh yeah, they were awful." No. That was who they were. It was well known.

Yeah.

Is that great behavior? Well, that's, that's kind of your choice. Like, no one made you work at Goldman. No, exactly. So if you opt in, deal with it. And if it becomes too much for you, go somewhere else, which obviously ultimately you did, whether it was for that reason or more opportunity. Yeah, but don't trash them for who they are as long as they're not lying about it. Right? If they're saying, oh, we always take care of everybody and then cutting 20%, then, then that's a place you might call them out.

That goes back to what you talked about before, which is the leadership transparency aspect is the most important. And that sort of runs all the way through to a company. The last thing we always talk about when we hire, I always anti-sell them. I tell them all the terrible things that'll be about working here because the last thing I want is them to change their entire livelihood, come here and then be shocked at what they get. And that would be a real tragedy.

It's a double tragedy because they're unhappy. But now you've invested and brought someone in and you have to fill your role again. It's much better to tell people, here's all the ugly stuff. And in fact, there is psychology, interestingly, that if you tell people all the ugly stuff and they say, I can handle that, then when it bothers them, they'll be like, well, I chose it. They'll actually do better.

That makes sense. Okay, so let's end on this. There's someone listening right now. Who is growing in their corporate career, they get to take one piece of advice from this podcast. What is the one thing you would give them from all of your lessons at some of the best companies of our age?

Uh, I think know what you want, know where you're going, and work with your manager to get there, right? Make a, make a deal, build that relationship and say, look, I wanna go here. How can I help you? And you help me get there. That almost always works.

So underrated. Your Twitter's amazing. Your X is amazing. I love following you there. Is that where you like people to go to follow along or if they want coaching or more greatness?

I think the best place to find me is LinkedIn because it's the sort of professional network I write there every day. And in fact, the original writing is on LinkedIn and then it's transported to Twitter. So I'm glad you love the Twitter, but it's a mirroring of LinkedIn because I serve corporate professionals and that's where they are.

I want to thank you for being here because I am taking notes and thinking about what I want to do differently right after this. So I know for the person listening, they're going to do the exact same thing. I think it's really rare and you already know this for people who are corporate and really successful to then go share this stuff. Not normal. Yeah. You know, I know you've gotten backlash for it and I know you've also gotten incredible things for it. It. So just thank you for sharing and sharing without being too politically correct, because that's not very useful to people who are in the midst of all this today. So thank you again.